What is Hope? How does one define Hope? What does it really mean? Technically, the definition of Hope is “a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen,” “Perseverance, a belief in a positive outcome.” But still a bit abstract. What does Hope look like? How do you taste it, feel it? Can you?
At Sari Bari, we’ve created a working definition of Hope. We Hope for the end of exploitation; we hope for the end of human trafficking; we hope for Justice; we hope for our women to find love, peace, joy, and acceptance. There is so much we hope for and so much worth hoping for. We think Hope is a discovery process. It doesn’t come over night. And we’ve seen this in our women. When our women come to us, they have no reason for hope because everything they’ve been taught and shown before never let them expend any energy on the like of HOPE. And then we begin the journey. The journey to self-discovery, the journey to believe they are more than what they’ve been told, the journey towards thinking to the future, instead of just living in the moment because that’s all they’ve been able to do. It’s the process of seeing themselves, their lives and their future in a different way. Sure, there are still bad times, still uncertainties, but they begin to see that there is something more. The possibility of something more. They begin to believe that they really are worth something more than they may have thought. They have value. They are no longer just another face, they have an identity.
Then slowly, they also begin to think about what else could be different. So many things are now possible because they’ve taken their first tangible step towards the seemingly intangible. Their kids could go to school. Their family could own land, build a house. They can touch the outcomes of their hard work and physically feel the cloth between their fingertips as they stitch a patch over their old life and start a new line down the road to Freedom. They are accomplished, they are business women. And as they take the steps towards a new life for themselves, and their families; they show the other girls and women that they can Hope too. And that their Hopes and Dreams, once discovered, could also be tangible.